Tiburon's beloved Blackie is galloping again in a new book

Regan McMahon, Chronicle Assistant Book Editor

Published
4:00 am PDT, Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Paige Peterson (left) and Christopher Cerf, co-authors of the book "Blackie, The Horse Who Stood Still" pose with Blackie's statue in Tiburon, CA. The book is based on a real horse who stood still for the last 28 of his 40 years in a Tiburon field that is now named "Blackie's Pasture." MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOGRAPHER AND SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE/ -MAGS OUT less

Paige Peterson (left) and Christopher Cerf, co-authors of the book "Blackie, The Horse Who Stood Still" pose with Blackie's statue in Tiburon, CA. The book is based on a real horse who stood still for the last ... more

Photo: Laura Morton

Photo: Laura Morton

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Paige Peterson (left) and Christopher Cerf, co-authors of the book "Blackie, The Horse Who Stood Still" pose with Blackie's statue in Tiburon, CA. The book is based on a real horse who stood still for the last 28 of his 40 years in a Tiburon field that is now named "Blackie's Pasture." MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOGRAPHER AND SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE/ -MAGS OUT less

Paige Peterson (left) and Christopher Cerf, co-authors of the book "Blackie, The Horse Who Stood Still" pose with Blackie's statue in Tiburon, CA. The book is based on a real horse who stood still for the last ... more

Photo: Laura Morton

Tiburon's beloved Blackie is galloping again in a new book

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What do kids like? Action. What holds their attention in a picture book? Action. So how do you write a book for kids about a horse whose claim to fame was standing stock still in a pasture in Tiburon for 28 years?

"It was a challenge," admits author Christopher Cerf during a conference call with close friend and artist Paige Peterson from Cerf's home/office in a townhouse on New York's Upper East Side. Together they created "Blackie, the Horse Who Stood Still," published this month by Welcome Books, an imprint of Random House (64 pages; $18.95). "That's why we had to dig deep and get into other things that Blackie had done before he stood in the pasture, like his days in the rodeo and his time as an Army horse in Yosemite, which allowed us to get a little fanciful."

"But it's all historically accurate," Peterson hastens to add.

Cerf, a writer, editor and composer-lyricist, was a key figure in the creation and production of "Sesame Street," has won two Grammys and three Emmy awards for the songs he's written and produced for that show and six Emmys for his PBS show "Between the Lions," which is designed to help children read. And he founded Sesame Workshop's books, record and toy division. So he knows a thing or two about what kids like.

Peterson grew up in Belvedere, the daughter of interior designer and former Mayor Connie Wiley. She would walk down the old railroad tracks in Tiburon to bring Blackie lumps of sugar and carrots, like other local children did, until he died at age 40 in 1966, when Peterson was 11. A bronze statue of the beloved swaybacked horse has stood in Blackie's Pasture since 1995, a gift of Tiburon's first mayor, Gordon Strawbridge.

The idea for the book came during a 2003 exhibition of Peterson's paintings at the Tiburon Gallery. Members of the board of the Tiburon Peninsula Foundation wanted to put a book out about Blackie and asked if she would illustrate it.

"I knew exactly who should write the text," says Peterson, who has worked with Cerf for 10 years. "So when I got back to New York I ran up the stairs and said, 'Chrissy, you're writing this book.' "

"That's right," says Cerf, laughing. "I had no choice in the matter. But seriously, it was a thrill for me to do a book that has such beautiful art in it. Many of the children's books I've worked on in the past were designed primarily to be humorous, so the illustration style we chose for them was usually cartoony rather than 'fine art.' "

One-third of the proceeds from the book will go to the Tiburon Peninsula Foundation, which maintains Blackie's Pasture. Cerf and Peterson are also appearing Saturday at Blackie's Hay Day, a benefit for the Children's Room at the Belvedere Tiburon Library that will be held in Blackie's Pasture. There will be food, games and pony rides for the kids, and at 1 p.m. the co-authors will give a reading and perform a song about Blackie that Cerf has composed, with Cerf at the piano.

Cerf has adult fans from his work with the National Lampoon, his "Not the New York Times" parody, the serious collections "The Gulf War Reader" and "The Iraq War Reader," co-edited with Michah L. Sifry, and his humorous 1998 book "The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation," co-written with Victor S. Navasky.

"The Experts Speak" is dedicated to Peterson, who while working as a researcher on the book was diagnosed with a brain tumor that the experts -- "five very powerful surgeons" -- told her had nothing to do with her lack of vision and the pain in her face. Finally she found one who saved her life by removing it.

"The brain tumor slowed me way down," she says, but led her to focus exclusively on painting, and her two young children, who are now in high school and college.

Blackie became a symbol of slow growth or no growth after his pasture was threatened with encroachment by developers in the 1960s. Cerf gently underscores this theme in his Dr. Seuss-like epic poem about the change-averse Blackie, which blends the iconoclastic stance of "Ferdinand the Bull" and the environmentalist spirit of Seuss' "The Lorax."

Here's how Cerf recounts what happened when a businessman proposed putting a mall in Blackie's pasture:

Then a shopping mall builder exclaimed, "Hey, I know,

A great spot where a new superhighway could go --

And besides, no one lives in this place by the bay,

But a useless old nag who just stands there all day.

"Yes, I'll pave the place over! I'll run a road through it!

I'll put up the world's biggest mall right next to it!

The traffic will flow! I'll be richer by far!"

Said the man, and he laughed and lit up a cigar.

But the people of Tiburon rejected his plan.

"No way!" said the mayor, wiping sweat from his forehead,

"Blackie doesn't like change -- and this change is horrid!

From Blackie we've learned not to squander

what's dear to us,

And he, and his pasture, have nothing to fear from us!"

Peterson's spare but evocative paintings and Cerf's clever verse keep the reader's interest through the poem's considerable length. (Hey, nobody ever complained that "Horton Hears a Who!" was too long.) When Cerf was in his 20s and an editor at Random House, the company co-founded by his father, Bennet Cerf, he worked with Dr. Seuss (Ted Geisel) on his Early Reader series.

"I wasn't so much influenced by that experience," says Cerf. "I was influenced by his amazing books like everyone else was." He said that the Seussian meter of this book was actually dictated by the phrase that describes its hero: "Blackie, the horse who stood still." "Just like when I wrote a song about imagination for 'Sesame Street,' the line had to have enough beats to accommodate all the syllables and accents in the word im-ag-in-a-tion."

Blackie remains an enduring symbol of Tiburon, cited in guidebooks and fondly remembered by those who knew him when he was alive and young people born long after he died. He even has his own MySpace site, which features a photo of the bronze statue and describes him as "Male, 100 years old."

"Me and my friends would sit on you every time we went yr way, yer so awesome," says one posting.

"I used to sit on u when I was little. I moved to Connecticut and I miss you soooooooo much now," says another.

"My dad pet you when you were alive," says a third.

Multiple posts thank Blackie for "repping Sharktown" -- translation: representing Tiburon, which means shark in Spanish. Who would have thought that the old swayback nag would touch the hearts of the hip-hop generation decades after he was gone?

Whether you remember the live Blackie or the bronze one, there's something comforting about an old friend who's always there, no matter how much the world around him changes. As 13-year-old Mark Doremus said in 1966 at the dedication of a plaque placed in Blackie's memory on a large rock in his pasture, Blackie was "a special horse, a children's horse," for boys and girls growing up "in a concrete world." And now, thanks to Cerf and Peterson, readers outside the Bay Area will get to know Blackie, too.